Book Review Guidelines
Book reviews are an opportunity to provide the reader with a brief but critical overview of the main arguments of a text. They provide a commentary of the book, rather than just a summary and allow the author to state their opinion on the work in question.
Content of the review
Although we do not intend the below to be prescriptive, this may be useful if you have not written a review before.
- Start with a brief summary of the contents of the overall topic of the text, the contents of the book and its overall argument, purpose or perspective.
- Offer a critical analysis of the contents. This will involve your opinion of the work; so for example, what you think is important, whether you think the overall arguments are convincing and whether it has increased your understanding of the area. You may also comment on whether you think there are further gaps in the literature which still need filling.
- Finally you should think about your audience and offer an opinion on whether you think the text would be useful for them.
Word length
Book reviews by their very nature should be relatively short and should not generally exceed 1,000 words. Reviews which are slightly longer will be considered where the review is either a body of work by the same author or more than one text on the same topic is being considered.
Format and Style
- Your review should be double-spaced in Times New Roman, using 12-point font.
- The referencing style is APA 7th edition – see https://apastyle.apa.org/products/publication-manual-7th-edition-introduction.pdf
- On the first page please state the name of the book, the author(s)/editor(s), the publisher, the date of publication and the ISBN number.